Boston University is the fourth-largest private university in the country and one of the world’s leading research universities.

With an impact that extends far beyond Commonwealth Avenue, Kenmore Square, and the Medical Campus, BU’s seventeen schools and colleges enroll more than 32,500 students from all fifty states and 135 foreign countries.

Since its founding, Boston University has embraced two principles that have come to define higher education today: a belief that the pursuit of learning is enhanced by direct engagement with the community and the world, and a conviction that higher education should be accessible to all. BU was the first to open all its divisions to women, the first to award a Ph.D. to a woman, the first coeducational medical college in the world.